There’s been a great deal of discussion about HD web video coming online. Unfortunately, real HD quality, which you would find on a big screen television set, is not realistic for Web video given slow Internet connections in the United States and computers with limited processing power.
In his review recent review of Hulu in the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg says that the quality of Hulu is very good but proper streaming demands connections of one megabit per second, faster than some DSL lines.
Adobe’s Kevin Towes says that an "HD Web Concept" is needed and H.264 is the solution. H.264 is the name of "codec," a software to encode video files. We spoke at length at Adobe’s San Francisco office earlier this month. Kevin and the crew are very keen on H.264. In addition to the quality, he says that files encoded with H.264 can be more easily transcoded from one format to the other.
We’re Going to Washington for Beet.TV’s First Event!!!
Speaking of Walt, he is speaking tomorrow at Beet.TV’s first ever conference, a roundtable of industry leaders tomorrow afternoon at the Embassy of Finland.
Participants will be joining us from Yahoo!, AOL, BrightCove, The Economist, Television Week, Blip.tv, Reuters, the NewsMarket, Contentinople, The Washington Post, Charlie Rose Show, HowCast, CNN.com, msnbc.com and Akamai. We hope to publish of Walt’s comments late tomorrow afternoon. Stay tuned. (And no, this is no April Fool’s joke.)
Below is Walt’s review of Hulu.
